


Lucky and Love

by crystalmist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Break Up, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-09 23:00:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18926728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalmist/pseuds/crystalmist
Summary: Sometimes, that overwhelming feeling is love, and it isn't romantic. Neville loosely recalls how he and his friends found their true love for each other following their time at Hogwarts through their break-ups.





	Lucky and Love

**Author's Note:**

> The neat pairing off of the major HP kids in the books/movies never really sat well with me. It felt a bit lazy, like these characters would never have the ability to figure themselves out as their own people, rather than as pawns and players in prophecy. So... here's a quick alternative to that!

Luna had written to him once, explaining that what they all had was love, but not romance, and that they would never have the latter, and that the former would become what it was always meant to be as the years passed. For Luna, it was an oddly lucid observation, and it was also one of the truths that only she seemed to grasp intuitively.

Neville himself only thought it made any sense because it clarified exactly how he felt about the time he had kissed her, in the aftermath of the battle for Hogwarts. Back when he wielded a sword instead of a potting shovel. He loved Luna, and he knew she loved him in her own way, and yet when he had met her mouth with his own the taste of victory was mixed with the taste of loss. They had smiled sadly at one another, not because of the kiss, but because of the context, and then laughed happily, hysterically. There was a lot of that in the early days.

When they weren’t all crying, they couldn’t stop laughing.

They got lucky. They were so lucky.

The wizarding world had been shocked when it got out that Harry and Ginny were no longer together. It had taken a while, because the Boy Who Lived and the youngest Weasley were so happy in those first few months afterward, particularly when they were together. 

Neville was more amused than surprised. He had, oddly enough, been present for that break up. 

Harry had asked him over, a relatively normal occurrence after the war. Instead of inviting him to have a laugh at the boggart he’d found in Number 12 as was customary (they couldn’t help laughing at what scared them these days, which confused the boggart, which reminded them of Lupin, which led either to crying or further laughter depending on the day), Harry offered him a cup of tea and asked very solemnly for his confidence. Neville nearly spilled the tea because, well, because he was Neville. And then Harry had plowed into this story about how he was in a relationship where something crucial was missing and he didn’t know what it was but that it was the foundation of the kind of relationship he was trying to have and maybe it would just be better to have the kind of relationship he did have all the pieces for and should he just tell Ginny that he loved her but he was not in love with her and he didn’t think he ever would be? And Neville had nodded along as his friend babbled, a small grin growing into a wide smile by the finale.

And when the kitchen door had burst open to a teary-eyed Ginny holding a tired-looking Extendable Ear and the happiest and most relieved look Neville had seen on her face, probably ever, he couldn’t help giving into laughter. She had thrown herself onto Harry, laughing and crying and managing to confess that she had felt awful because she knew there was something off. She had thought it out much better than Harry had – that the acting out of her childhood crush was distracting from the fact that she and Harry were developing a really wonderful loving friendship. Neville had piped in, very helpfully, that maybe their attempted romantic relationship was just a source of stress and unmet expectations, and that maybe they should work on the friendship that they had not noticed rooted down so beautifully.

Ginny allowed Harry to just be Harry, who was a skinny awkward Quidditch junkie. And Harry allowed Ginny to be whatever she wanted to be, which was everything including a peppery confident Quidditch junkie.

Neville laughed the most when he was with those two, laughing at each other. For three young people who had lost, been tools, been victims, that laughter was their strength, their power. 

They were so lucky.

Harry and Ginny’s split may have been tabloid fodder because of the whole Harry Potter part, it was Ron and Hermione’s break up that had rocked their private world. Their love turned everyone on to Luna’s wisdom about the evolution of love.

Ron had woken to an empty apartment and a letter and that’s how he knew she had left. He cried to Harry, to Ginny, to his mother. She was gone for two months before he opened the letter, and he only did then because no one had heard from Hermione since her departure and they were all concerned. The letter caused many more days of crying, but that crying transitioned into laughter as the weeks and months passed.

Hermione wrote, with a verbosity that only she still make endearing, that she had finally come to terms with the fact that she was ruining one of her favorite people in the world, if only to herself. She painted a picture of her love for Ron, which she had come to realize, reflecting on years of being saved by him, seeing him sacrifice for his friends, facing and conquering his fears and preconceived notions, was not romantic. No, she loved Ronald Weasley as her personal hero, the person she admired most in the whole world. Not only was she not worthy of a romantic relationship with him, she asserted, she believed that she was bringing down her idol by being in a relationship that demanded things from Ron that she only wanted in the most important of contexts. Neville and Harry and Ginny and Mrs. Weasley and Fleur and pretty much everyone else they had a personal relationship with agreed that it was probably the greatest love letter ever written. Odd for a breakup.

And so by leaving him, Hermione Granger allowed Ron to finally see that he was everything he had always dreamed to one very important person.

When Ron stopped crying and started laughing at the letter, Neville had let out the breath he'd been holding over the situation.

When Ron grew serious six months after Hermione’s departure, no one knew what to think.

Ron Weasley was not to be outdone by Ms. Granger.

He wrote her back, on a scrap of parchment barely big enough for the message it carried. All it said was “Hermione- You taught me how to believe in magic. -Ron.”

She was back in a week, laughing as she walked into the apartment that she was now sharing with a different Weasley, who had been looking to move out of Number 12 officially. They gathered that night, the girls piled on the couch, legs entangled in a territorial battle that neither was willing to cede, and Neville, Ron, and Harry experimenting with how Wizard’s Chess pieces reacted to being moved in the wrong ways.

“I went to Luna,” Hermione said, without prompting. “Neville, she sends her love, and would like you to watch out for the Magnusson Temporal Alignment next Vainsday.”

Neville had to laugh at that. He'd made up the Magnusson event in a letter to Luna a long time ago, and it was how they signed each letter.

“Bet you’re glad you did,” he replied more seriously. Luna understood more than the rest of them about the way the world really worked.

They had gotten lucky. The were all so lucky.


End file.
